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| Leen Hijaz giving her speech |
Last week, Curmie wrote about Jonas Hole, who gave the salutatorian address at his graduation ceremony at D’Iberville High School in Biloxi despite being misgendered by his principal. This time, the student graduation speaker to make national headlines is Leen Hijaz, who wasn’t allowed to finish her valedictory speech at Clayton (NC) High School, outside Raleigh.
Well, that’s not quite accurate. First off, it was technically a “welcome
speech” as opposed to a valedictory address per se. Curmie isn’t sure why that matters, but
perhaps it does. Secondly, it appears
that she was able to finish the part of her remarks that had been pre-approved
by the administration. It was only the
add-on at the end that caused controversy.
You will no doubt be shocked to learn, Gentle Reader, that Ms. Hijaz
is not the first-ever adolescent to disobey the strictures of authority.
Anyway, school principal Melissa Moore Hubbard stomps onto the stage and pushes Hijaz away from the podium, allegedly threatening not merely to withhold her diploma, but to deny her graduation. And what heinous invocation of Satan himself did Hijaz utter? Well, this:
Before I leave the stage, there is one more thing I have to say. Every single person here has a voice, and we are privileged to have the freedom to use it when so many people around the world are struggling and suffering to be heard. Whether it’s the millions suffering in Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Afghanistan and so many other countries around the world, or the families being torn apart by ICE, these are not distant issues. They are happening right now as I speak. My point is, we’re not given a voice to stay silent.
(She does repeat a
couple of phrases; she explained in a TikTok post the next day that the principal had been yelling at her, causing her to
“stutter.”)
You will note, Gentle Reader, that her words were a
description of reality. Are the young
adults of the near future going to face a world in which the crises she
describes are all too present? Yes. Are we, as Americans, however much we might
feel constrained by this or that censorial asshat, “privileged” in terms of
financial stability, educational opportunities, and constitutional guarantees
of free expression, when compared to the inhabitants of much of the rest of the
world? Yes. Is it appropriate for those with the ability
to use their voices for the sake of the common good for them to do so? Yes. Are
there millions of people in those specified locations (and many others) who are
“struggling and suffering”? Yes. Are there families being torn apart by
ICE? Yes.
Hijaz argues that “Nothing [she] said was political; it was
pure awareness.” Curmie agrees. There is no condemnation of Israel for events
in Palestine, no insistence that the US intervene to stop the Ebola outbreak in
Congo, and so on. Yes, the line about
ICE comes rather close to a comment on that agency’s cowardice, intentional cruelty, and
perfidious over-reach, but those descriptors are Curmie’s, not hers. She may (likely does) agree with Curmie, but
all she said was an objective truth.
For her deviation from what we suspect was the pabulum of the approved script, she was shunted by the powers-that-be, or at least so she claims. The superintendent and several other bigwigs put their hands in their pockets rather than shake her hand when the apparently-not-actual-diplomas were distributed. Her friend who gave her a hug onstage was similarly told that her diploma would be withheld. As if denying the high school valedictorian (who graduated a year early, by the way) a piece of paper matters in the least, right?
Curmie is pretty sure he hasn’t
seen his high school diploma in decades, although it might be in one of those
boxes he salvaged in 2022 after selling what had been his father’s house. It’s the transcript that matters, and we’re
talking about a valedictorian here; she’s planning to attend the University of
North Carolina, and it’s a pretty fair bet she’ll get her degree. (The school now says she did get her diploma;
we trust her friend did, too.)
What’s on display here is the puerile petulance of an all-too-prevalent
strain of high school administrators: those whose self-importance completely
outshadows any actual competence they might once have had. Even threatening to withhold a diploma is an
act of petulance, a last gasp of self-entitled relevance, and, as someone
pointed out on Reddit, an excellent way of turning a minor incident into
embarrassing headlines on a national scale.
And that sure did seem like a lot of applause from the audience when
Hijaz went off-script. Maybe reading the
room would be a good thing.
OK. Let’s grant that deviating
from the approved script broke the rules, but in this case, even though it was
intentional, was the equivalent of going 57 in a 45 when you’re the only one on the road, not of stealing the car. Talk to her privately after
the event, express displeasure, and move on.
But something Hijaz said on TikTok really stood out: “Obviously,
if I said what I was going to say at the end of my speech, if I submitted it to
the school, they would have disapproved it immediately, because of how racist
they are.” The first part of that
sentence is rather predictable. Whether
it’s true, Curmie can’t say, but young Leen seems a bright lass, and she knows the
environment better than we do.
But attributing Hubbard’s over-reaction to racism seems a
bit much. Curmie has no doubt that Hijaz
faced actual racism at multiple points in her academic life. When she references “all of the stuff that I
personally have experienced as a Muslim Arab girl going to school here in
Johnston County,” Curmie gets it. But
whether this particular incident in linked to racism is another matter. As Curmie has said repeatedly for a very long
time, all racism is stupid, bur not all stupidity is racist.
Curmie suspects that if Suzy Creamcheese (bonus points if
you catch the Frank Zappa reference, Gentle Reader) had the audacity to stray
from the censored pre-approved script to actually say something in a
graduation speech, Hubbard’s reaction would have been the same. It may also be worth noting that whereas
Hijaz claims she lives in “a very white area,” US News and World Report lists the minority population at 61%, so there may be some questions of
perception here. (To be fair, she also
says “we do have a lot of diversity, still.”)
It’s also important that Hijaz’s comments about racism come after the graduation
ceremony. They are controversial in and
of themselves; those tacked on to the end of her speech were not. You know what was problematic? The three (Christian) prayers at a public school event.
What Hijaz definitely did not do was to “make it all
about [her]self,” as she claims Hubbard accused her of doing. There are two variations on the theme of
irony at play here. One is the radical
misinterpretation of an attempt to represent in some small way the millions of
people who, through no fault of their own, are de facto silenced by
their circumstances: the exact opposite of her intentions. The other, of course, is censoring comments
about how people ought to be free of censorship. <Sigh.>
Finally, of course, there’s the Streisand Effect. As suggested above, the Reddit post about the incident shows two things: overwhelming support for Hijaz rather than Hubbard, and frequent mentions of the simple fact that no one outside the immediate audience would have paid the slightest attention were it not for the attempt to silence a student, a valedictorian, at her own graduation. Leen Hijaz’s actions are not above reproach, but she’s unquestionably the more sympathetic figure in this episode. Forward-Bank8412’s comment on Reddit reads, “Streisand this shit, internet!!” Curmie is just doing his part…
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